Delighting in the Shame of Others

Here’s a pretty bizarre story that comes right after the story of the flood. It has a despicable place in history as a long held justification for slavery. Pseudo-scholars took this passage as a prescription for history, saying that Africans were descendants of Ham, and that the enslavement of the black races was merely a fulfillment of what Genesis had predicted.

Yikes. I don’t think I need to go into the details debunking this. But rethinking this passage has value for us today….a lesson often missed in the past.

Genesis 9

  

 20-23 Noah, a farmer, was the first to plant a vineyard. He drank from its wine, got drunk and passed out, naked in his tent. Ham, the father of Canaan, saw that his father was naked and told his two brothers who were outside the tent. Shem and Japheth took a cloak, held it between them from their shoulders, walked backward and covered their father's nakedness, keeping their faces turned away so they did not see their father's exposed body.

 24-27 When Noah woke up with his hangover, he learned what his youngest son had done. He said,

   Cursed be Canaan! A slave of slaves,

      a slave to his brothers!

   Blessed be God, the God of Shem,

      but Canaan shall be his slave.

   God prosper Japheth,

      living spaciously in the tents of Shem.

   But Canaan shall be his slave.

 

The word “told”  as it is used here, is actually one that implies telling others with great delight. Ham is not just passing along the message that Noah has taken a serious bender after getting off the ark and in the process gotten naked. He’s really thrilled about the humiliation of Noah, and delights in pointing out the shamefulness of the behavior.

And it’s not like a bunch of frat boys bragging about how drunk and crazy they got. There is a part of our culture which glorifies the foolishness that happens when we get drunk. I’ve been a part of, and told those stories myself. But that’s not what’s going here. In Noah’s time there’s a real taboo about nudity that ties in to issues of purity and disgust. It starts in the earlier stories about the garden of Eden, when we hear about the shame of Adam and Eve when they realize their nakedness. The point here is,  that the one guy on earth God had trusted to save humanity from the flood, has made (at least in the eyes of everyone involved) one serious and humiliating mistake.

And one of his sons is thrilled and trying to make a public issue out of it.

Notice that Shem and Japheth have a different response. It’s not that there’s truly something wrong with seeing your father naked – their response is about preserving honor.  But Ham delights in the humiliation of another.

And the consequence of Ham's delighting in his father's shame....is slavery.

What is it about delighting in the shame of another person that leads to slavery?

Interestingly not slavery for Ham, but for his son Canaan. And by Canaan, the author isn’t probably suggesting just his son, but means more that the generations that follow in Ham’s bloodline will feel the effects of this decision. I’m not sure why this is so, but it seems to hint that the effects are that subtle kind of multi-generational sickness of the soul that can sometimes be hard to put your finger on, but you just know is there.

There might be a bunch of ways of thinking about this, but I’m inclined to think it might have something to do with the way Jesus so often points out that what we do, how we treat others has a huge impact on our souls. The curse on Cannan isn't so much an inescapable punishment for behaving badly, it's more of a natural consequence of where his heart is to begin with.

I find myself in this story. A while back, I delighted in the humiliation of Harold Camping. This is the Christian radio station network owner who predicted the end of the world in May 21, 2011, then changed it to October 21, 2011 and was obviously wrong on both counts. It drew a fair bit of media attention, and I honestly admit that I enjoyed laughing at the way he was portrayed as just another religious nut. I wanted to see him discredited because I have some serious issues with the way he and others in Christian media misuse their power to promote a twisted right-wing religious agenda that hides behind a false façade of family values and taking the scriptures seriously.

If you share this view, you might wonder what could be wrong with my delight in his humiliation?

Perhaps it comes back to Jesus’ teaching when he tells us not to think of ourselves as better than others, or not to see the spec in the eye of another and miss the plank in our own eyes.

The truth is, as soon as I delight in the humiliation of another, I see myself as better than the other, and fail to see my own brokenness. I fail to acknowledge my own participation in the very sins at which I’m pointing a finger. I dislike Harold Camping because he makes a fool out of people of faith with his ridiculous behavior. He reduces God to a spiteful, capricious, tyrant, whose only concern is getting people to "believe" in him.  I have to admit, I probably make a fool out of people of faith my behavior at times as well.  I also am guilty of reducing God to things that He/She is not.

But to compare his sin with mine is missing the point. It’s not a competition – the point is, that if I look at Harold and delight in his humiliation, I am no longer looking at my own soul, my own mistakes, my own brokenness.

And we all know how this leads to slavery. When I refuse to gaze at my own broken condition, I immediately become bound to it.

So this this bizarre little story after the better known one of the ark has a profound implication for me, and, for all of us. If we delight in the humiliation and shame of another, we loose sight of our own brokenness, and when we fail to keep our brokenness in view, we are slaves to it and the power it exerts on our lives. The curse that follows is equally daunting - that our children and grandchildren and generations to come will suffer and be slaves to sin because we could not see our own failings and need for redemption.